One of the best titles from 2018 is about to get a port for mobile phones. Motion Twin’s Dead Cells, a roguelike-metroidvania 2D video game, is set to arrive on both iOS and Android devices later this year. It will first arrive on iOS devices this summer, with the Android version still in development. What’s more, this will very much be like the experience you get from playing on other platforms; Dead Cells on mobile is a premium title, costing $8.99 and featuring absolutely no ads or in-app purchases.
Porting the title is not a piece of cake, though. Dead Cells is heavily reliant on its control scheme, and the Dark Souls of metroidvanias is brutally hard on traditional platforms, even more so on a platform with touch controls. In an exclusive with Gamasutra, Playdigious, the studio handling Motion Twin’s port, gives us an in-depth look at how they made sure that this port is going to stack up with its predecessors.
“When we started working on Dead Cells, we couldn’t even imagine what challenges were waiting for us around the corner. However, we’ve tackled challenging ports before,” says Laura Saada, lead producer at Playdigious. “We previously worked on Shiro Games’ Evoland 2, a complex 20-hour-long RPG. Even its developers didn’t believe it was doable on mobile, due to this complexity.”
It’s good to hear that a competent studio will be handling the port, and what’s even better is one that acknowledges the challenges that come with it. The thing that was focused on the most, therefore, was successfully translating Dead Cells’ controls to a touchscreen.
“For us and Dead Cells, the difficulty was to translate all the controls to a touch screen (and on mobile, the controls are often the UI),” Saada said. “We knew there wasn’t a perfect solution for everyone, so we decided very early to let players decide for themselves. There are controls by default, and I personally hope this will be a good fit for them as it is. But if not, a lot of other options are available. Hopefully players will appreciate those options and will enjoy this new experience of taking one of their favorite games everywhere.”
I personally share Saada’s hope in this venture, seeing as Dead Cells could be amazing in a mobile platform for people who do not own the Switch. We just have to wait and see if it can hold up to its console cousins. You can look up the rest of her exclusive interview on Gamasutra right here.
Dead Cells is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows PC, macOS, Linux, and the Nintendo Switch. The mobile port for iOS is expected sometime this summer, and the Android versions sometime this year.
